SEO very much a nebulous concept. It’s hard to look at a piece of content and analyze just how valuable that content is. It’s hard to tell how much value changing your meta titles may be. There are so many aspects of SEO, major and minor, it becomes hard to quantify and measure. Therefore, measuring the long-term cost-benefit ratio for an SEO plan is a matter of setting goals, monitoring costs and benefits, and comparing numbers as you go.
Setting Goals
The first step to measuring the efficacy of your SEO plan is to set goals. If you have reasonable goals and you don’t meet them in a reasonable amount of time, or with a reasonable amount of expense, you need to step back and re-evaluate what you’re doing.
Set some short-term goals, some long-term goals, and some in between. Make sure these goals are reasonable for the time frame. No “I want a million followers by this time next year” when you have 100 right now. Make sure they are also concrete. Don’t say you want doubled growth; say you want to be doing $10,000 in weekly sales.
You also need to make sure your goals are measureable. If you can’t put down a concrete number now, and a concrete num…

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